The SENCER Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) allows students to rate how much specific activities in SENCER courses help their learning. The assessment tool also asks students to report on their science skills and interests, as well as the civic activities in which they engage.
The primary purpose of the SALG is to provide instructors with useful, formative feedback to faculty interested in improving their teaching. Students rate how much class activities such as lectures, discussions, or labs help their learning. The SALG also provides a snapshot of student skills and attitudes at the beginning and end of courses, allowing instructors to gauge the effectiveness of their instruction in specific areas. The SENCER SALG will also inform the national assessment of the SENCER program.
The SALG is unlike the traditional Faculty Course Questionnaire in that it does not ask students to rate the competencies of their instructors. It is also not meant to be used as a test or quiz. In the spring of 2008, a new, updated SALG platform was launched – the result of efforts by a team supported by the National Science Foundation. Many improvements have been made to the instrument and the website to ease use and to take advantage of the latest research on teaching and learning.
The SALG retains its basic format of 10 question-stems: 6 related to course design and practices, and 4 related to course learning objectives. To ensure the conceptual identity of the SALG, these 10 question-stems can no longer be changed or deleted, nor can their answer-scales be altered. Within these limits, however, you may add to, delete or change any of the sub-questions under these stems to adapt your SALG to the specific design and goals of your course. These sub-questions are grouped now more coherently, and their content has been updated to apply to a broader variety of disciplines and course-types.
On the SALG website – http://salgsite.org – you can opt to administer a Baseline survey (formerly called the Pre-survey) to see where your students are in relation to your learning objectives at the beginning of the course. There are now two templates from which to build your end-of-the-term SALG:
- A no-frills version designed for traditional lecture-and-discussion teachers (called Basic), and
- A full-featured version for instructors who include other kinds of activities in their courses (called Full)
As before, you can also choose to begin from an instrument you have used before or from an instrument developed by a colleague. The new site allows you to merge instruments easily, so that you can take advantage of an instrument that you have developed for a particular course, and still easily incorporate a whole set of questions present in another instrument—your own or someone else’s. Finally, the new site includes more powerful analytical tools to help you better understand the feedback gathered by your SALG, including a tool that allows you to code student’s answers to open-ended questions so that you can analyze them statistically.
